Tracking devices are used today to monitor the location of people or objects in real-time. These devices have certain localization and tracking mechanisms that determine the location (e.g., a GPS location) and/or information relevant to the location of tracking device, such as information associated with GSM, Wi-Fi, RFID, etc. These devices can also employ certain communication mechanisms, such as GSM, GPRS, Wi-Fi, ZigBee, etc., in order to communicate the location information to a user or a server at some distance.
Applications based on these tracking devices may require the target to be localized under an assortment of various situations, such as an outdoor environment with clear sky visibility, an outdoor urban area, known or registered indoor locations, unknown indoor locations, etc. Single communication and single localization mechanisms cannot provide uninterrupted functionality across these changing situations. The existing market solutions do not have devices with multilayered tracking and/or multilayered communication mechanisms, and hence functionality of these solutions is limited to few (mostly one) situations.
A majority of commercial tracking products are only GPS-based and are unable to function in various indoor environments. Further, a well-recognized use of GPS in theft recovery situations has given rise to the use of jamming devices by wrongdoers, thereby rendering a majority of current market devices used for this purpose impractical. Moreover, existing solutions are incapable of localizing a target object under various situations including unknown indoor locations or a battery outage on the tracking device. Finally, weight, size, battery life, and existing infrastructure associated with current tracking devices remains problematic.